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A friend's art website, from five concepts to a live site

A friend needed a minimal, colourful website for her paper-collage art and her handmade toys. I went from five generated concepts to a live site on its own domain in one day, then grew it into six collections.

Design
Images

Project page

Updated11 Oct 2026

The problem

A friend's art and handmade-toy brand needed a website. She wanted it minimal and colourful, showing her prints and her Loveys (the handmade toys) on their own page, with an About page and a clear request not to copy her work. Selling online could come later.

What I built

A static website with an artwork homepage, six collection pages, a separate Loveys page and an About page. Each collection opens in a zoomable viewer that also works from the keyboard. Every piece shows its title and print size, and every page carries her copyright and reproduction notice.

Desktop home page of the artist's website: a purple opening band with the headline A world in shapes, Bold color, Wild imagination, beside a paper-collage bird on a green square, and a yellow band below introducing the collections. — The bright opening the artist chose, with one of her own collages instead of any generated image.

Farm Animals collection page with a yellow header saying 8 artworks, and a grid of wide collages of chickens, cows and farm animals seen from behind, each with its title and a 5 by 15 inch print size. — Each collection page lists every piece with its title and print size, and opens into a zoomable viewer.

Phone view of the Loveys page: the headline Little companions, Made by hand, a short description of the handmade toy, and a photo of four colourful fabric loveys laid on a white surface. — The handmade toys live on their own page, as she asked, and the layout holds up on a phone.

Equipment

Codex CLI Harnesses and agents
GPT (GPT-5.5 to GPT-6.1 in Codex, GPT Image in Codex) AI models
Claude Code Harnesses and agents
Claude (Opus 4.6 to 5.5) AI models
Figma Design and media
Astro Code and infrastructure
Vercel Code and infrastructure
Porkbun Apps and services
GitHub and GitHub Pages Code and infrastructure

How I built it

Downloaded all 63 files she shared and checked each one against the sizes and MD5 checksums in Google Drive.
Generated five homepage concepts with Codex's built-in image tool (The Gallery, Color Field, Maker's Studio, Editorial Folio and Playful Index), then rebuilt them as editable Figma layouts at 1440 and 390 pixels wide.
She liked two of them, so I merged them. A Claude Opus 5.5 critique said the page still showed little of who made the work or how, so I added a paper-to-print section, a fuller gallery and a maker biography.
Built the approved design as a static Astro site, deployed it on Vercel and connected the existing domain without touching its nameservers.
Added her collections and later edits in rounds, and after each release compared every live file with the build.

Results

From the first concept to a live site on its own domain took one day, 2026-10-02.
The site has six collections with 58 artworks, and since 2026-10-11 all 58 show a print size.
After the 2026-10-11 release, all 147 live files matched the build byte for byte.
The collection pages were checked at 320, 768 and 1440 pixels wide with no horizontal overflow.
Every image on the site comes from her own files. The generated concepts guided the layout only.

What I learned

Use generated images to choose a direction, then build from the real files. I checked image hashes against her originals, so no generated picture stands in for her art.

A bright layout was not enough on its own. The outside critique pointed out that the page said little about the artist and her hand-cut process, and the process section fixed that.

Check where a deployment actually went. Vercel put the very first deployment into production even though I had asked for a preview.

Lab notes

11 Oct 2026

I added her copyright and reproduction notice to every page, put in her new artwork titles, replaced three artwork files and showed print sizes on all 58 pieces.
5 Oct 2026

Six collection pages joined the site, with 58 artworks, in the order she asked for.
2 Oct 2026

Codex generated five homepage concepts from her own artwork and logo. I merged the two she liked, added a paper-to-print section after a Claude critique, and had the site live in Astro on Vercel, on its own domain, the same day.